Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Michigan 🔗 Popular Culture 🔗 Finland

Sisu is a Finnish concept described as stoic determination, tenacity of purpose, grit, bravery, resilience, and hardiness and is held by Finns themselves to express their national character. It is generally considered not to have a literal equivalent in English.

DBOS is a Database-Oriented Operating System designed to simplify and improve the scalability, security and resilience of large-scale distributed applications. It started in 2020 as a joint open source project with MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon University, after a brainstorm between Michael Stonebraker and Matei Zaharia on how to scale and improve scheduling and performance of millions of Apache Spark tasks.

The basic idea is to run a multi-node multi-core, transactional, highly-available distributed database, such as VoltDB, as the only application for a microkernel, and then to implement scheduling, messaging, file systems and other operating system services on top of the database.

The architectural philosophy is described by this quote from the abstract of their initial preprint:

All operating system state should be represented uniformly as database tables, and operations on this state should be made via queries from otherwise stateless tasks. This design makes it easy to scale and evolve the OS without whole-system refactoring, inspect and debug system state, upgrade components without downtime, manage decisions using machine learning, and implement sophisticated security features.

Stonebraker claims a variety of security benefits, from a "smaller, less porous attack surface", to the ability to log and analyze how the system state changes in real-time due to the transactional nature of the OS. Recovery from a severe bug or an attack can be as simple as rolling back the database to a previous state. And since the database is already distributed, the complexity of orchestration systems like Kubernetes can be avoided.

A prototype was built with competitive performance to existing systems.

NAR 2 (Serbian Nastavni Računar 2, en. Educational Computer 2) is a theoretical model of a 32-bit word computer created by Faculty of Mathematics of University of Belgrade professor Nedeljko Parezanović as an enhancement to its predecessor, NAR 1. It was used for Assembly language and Computer architecture courses. The word "nar" means Pomegranate in Serbian. Many NAR 2 simulators have been created — for instance, one was named "Šljiva" (en. plum) as that fruit grows in Serbia, while "nar" does not.

🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Amphibians and Reptiles

The boiling frog is a fable describing a frog being slowly boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness of people to react to or be aware of sinister threats that arise gradually rather than suddenly.

While some 19th-century experiments suggested that the underlying premise is true if the heating is sufficiently gradual, according to contemporary biologists the premise is false: a frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Indeed, thermoregulation by changing location is a fundamentally necessary survival strategy for frogs and other ectotherms.

🔗 Video games

MIDI Maze is a networked first-person shooter for the Atari ST developed by Xanth Software F/X and released in 1987 by Hybrid Arts. The game takes place in a maze of untextured walls. The world animates smoothly as the player turns, much like the earlier Wayout, instead of only permitting 90 degree changes of direction. It has been suggested that MIDI Maze, using the built-in MIDI ports of the Atari ST for networking, introduced the concept of deathmatch combat. The game found a wider audience on the Game Boy as Faceball 2000.

The original MIDI Maze team consisted of James Yee as the business manager, Michael Park as the graphic and networking programmer, and George Miller writing the AI and drone logic.

🔗 International relations 🔗 France 🔗 Law 🔗 Politics 🔗 Basque 🔗 Islands 🔗 Spain

Pheasant Island (French: Île des Faisans/Île de la Conférence, Spanish: Isla de los Faisanes, Basque: Konpantzia) is an uninhabited river island in the Bidasoa river, located between France and Spain, whose administration alternates between both nations.

🔗 Economics

In finance, the rule of 72, the rule of 70 and the rule of 69.3 are methods for estimating an investment's doubling time. The rule number (e.g., 72) is divided by the interest percentage per period (usually years) to obtain the approximate number of periods required for doubling. Although scientific calculators and spreadsheet programs have functions to find the accurate doubling time, the rules are useful for mental calculations and when only a basic calculator is available.

These rules apply to exponential growth and are therefore used for compound interest as opposed to simple interest calculations. They can also be used for decay to obtain a halving time. The choice of number is mostly a matter of preference: 69 is more accurate for continuous compounding, while 72 works well in common interest situations and is more easily divisible. There is a number of variations to the rules that improve accuracy. For periodic compounding, the exact doubling time for an interest rate of r percent per period is

${\displaystyle t={\frac {\ln(2)}{\ln(1+r/100)}}\approx {\frac {72}{r}}}$,

where t is the number of periods required. The formula above can be used for more than calculating the doubling time. If one wants to know the tripling time, for example, replace the constant 2 in the numerator with 3. As another example, if one wants to know the number of periods it takes for the initial value to rise by 50%, replace the constant 2 with 1.5.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/Science fiction

We (Russian: Мы, romanized: My) is a dystopian novel by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, written 1920–1921. The novel was first published as an English translation by Gregory Zilboorg in 1924 by E. P. Dutton in New York. The novel describes a world of harmony and conformity within a united totalitarian state. George Orwell claimed that Aldous Huxley's 1931 Brave New World must be partly derived from We, but Huxley denied it.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Physiology

Compassion fatigue is a condition characterized by emotional and physical exhaustion leading to a diminished ability to empathize or feel compassion for others, often described as the negative cost of caring. It is sometimes referred to as secondary traumatic stress (STS). According to the Professional Quality of Life Scale, burnout and secondary traumatic stress are two interwoven elements of compassion fatigue.

Compassion fatigue is considered to be the result of working directly with victims of disasters, trauma, or illness, especially in the health care industry. Individuals working in other helping professions are also at risk for experiencing compassion fatigue. These include child protection workers, veterinarians, teachers, social workers, palliative care workers, journalists, police officers, firefighters, animal welfare workers, public librarians, health unit coordinators, and Student Affairs professionals. Non-professionals, such as family members and other informal caregivers of people who have a chronic illness, may also experience compassion fatigue. The term was first coined in 1992 by Carla Joinson to describe the negative impact hospital nurses were experiencing as a result of their repeated, daily exposure to patient emergencies.

People who experience compassion fatigue may exhibit a variety of symptoms including lowered concentration, numbness or feelings of helplessness, irritability, lack of self-satisfaction, withdrawal, aches and pains, or work absenteeism.

Journalism analysts argue that news media have caused widespread compassion fatigue in society by saturating newspapers and news shows with decontextualized images and stories of tragedy and suffering. This has caused the public to become desensitized or resistant to helping people who are suffering.

🔗 California 🔗 Companies 🔗 Technology 🔗 Private Equity 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area

Y Combinator is an American seed accelerator launched in March 2005 and has been used to launch over 2,000 companies including Stripe, Airbnb, Cruise Automation, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, and Dropbox. The combined valuation of the top YC companies was over $155 billion as of October, 2019.